My Head Hurts

As I consider replacing a power supply to keep my 5 year old Sandy Bridge desktop going, I was struck by some of the "bleeding edge" hardware announcements that just came out at Computex 2017 in Taiwan. Some of this is still vaporware but it looks like Intel will have a top end CPU with 18 cores and 36 threads and AMD one with 16 cores and 32 threads. New mobos and a new socket are needed in Intel's case - not so sure about AMD. Other features for Intel include massive PCIe and USB 3.1 capability, multiple NVME drive arrays, quad channel DDR4 ..blah blah blah.
All this gives me a headache. As a Linux user I am happy to cruise along years behind the times. I just don't see how I would need 16+ cores of power any time soon - and this doesn't even include the processing power of the latest GPUs. Will Linux even support this stuff in the foreseeable future?. Even a hardcore gamer would be hard pressed to use more than 4 cores on the CPU.
I kinda wonder what's going on and whether I should care about this stuff at all for another 5-6 years.

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

There is no doubt that CPUs have come a long way since 1999. And a decent quad core CPU will kick butt compared to an underpowered pig like the Atoms they put in all those netbooks back around 2009.
That said, the whole CPU development thing lately has been more about reducing power consumption and extending battery life than it has about raw performance.
I have two desktops. Both of them I'd describe as powerful, responsive snappy. Desktop 1 has a Sandy Bridge quad core which is 5 generations behind the times. Desktop 2 has a second generation AMD Bulldozer APU which was crippled from the get-go by bad design decisions. Yet I'm happy with them both.
The reason for this is that there are many other factors today which influence perceived computer power and responsiveness, namely:

An SSD . The difference in performance made by an SSD is night and day. Nothing I've ever seen comes close.

Fast Internet. Better downloads, faster web browsing.

Lotsa RAM. You want to load it and leave it in RAM, not swap it to the hard drive. Even if you have an SSD it's better to keep data in RAM.

Decent graphics. It doesn't have to be state of the art But I see a definite improvement with a discrete video card.

A lighter O/S. Linux is better than Windows with its CPU sucking security apps. And a lighter desktop environment is clearly snappier no matter how much computing horsepower you have.

In short, while I find it interesting to read about all the Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Ryzen CPUs I hope my old school quad cores keep on truckin' for a few years yet.

"An SSD . The difference in performance made by an SSD is night and day. Nothing I've ever seen comes close."

is spot on. When I built my new rig I donated my old one to my sister but before I gave it to her I popped in a cheapo ssd. The difference that made was to put it mildly amazing. A £30 hardware spend that turned a 2008 era pc into a reasonable 2015 performer. Whilst it may be a tad sluggish with bigger programs for everyday stuff like web surfing, viewing photos and officey tasks it performs pretty neatly.

I have also installed a cheapo ssd in an even older Dell which I have been using as my main rigg for 18 months and that has given decent performance too for ordinary daily tasks.

If I could have used a ssd and a newer graphics card I would have used them with my very old Athlon Thunderbird as I was sentimentaly attached to my first pc. Alas the graphics were not upgradeable and I never tried to upgrade to a ssd as the old girl did not have sata connections and without the more modern graphics I felt my time would be better spent on some other project.

InstallARCHYou'll never need to install it again
"I did and I'm really happy"~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

It's a matter of horses for courses, surely.
If you have the latest tech that supports NVME I'd certainly go that way. If you have something like my 2010 era Toshiba netbook, the cheapest SSD will do and still make a considerable difference. It'll turn something unusable into a decent travel companion.
I wouldn't bother with anything older than SATA II though. If you have first gen SATA chances are the rest of your hardware will be bottlenecked somehow.
As for IDE / PATA well...

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

Yes by now the SSD has gone mainstream for sure. Samsung is the brand that seems to get the most acclaim, but Toshiba makes some nice ones too. Toshiba recently got into the consumer biz in a big way by acquiring OCZ. SanDisk was bought by Western Digital. Interestingly Seagate seems to be concentrating more on NVME and server technology when it comes to soiid state.

Yes by now the SSD has gone mainstream for sure. Samsung is the brand that seems to get the most acclaim, but Toshiba makes some nice ones too. Toshiba recently got into the consumer biz in a big way by acquiring OCZ. SanDisk was bought by Western Digital. Interestingly Seagate seems to be concentrating more on NVME and server technology when it comes to soiid state.

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

I might have gone over the top slightly with my build but for once I wanted a pc that was leading edge.

Your right the 951 is a m2 which are pretty hot in use and on my board the m2 slots are darn close to some potentially hot stuff. So I hunted a pci-e add-on card that I could use in slot three which is the coolest place to use. I also knew I would be only using one gfx card so there would be plenty of space between the 951 and the gfx. Plus me gfx has three fans which help to draw heat away from the 951. Also using the pci-e slot for the 951 means it can run at full speed and no sata slots are lost. Win win all round. Mind you finding a decent cheap add on card took some time and getting Windows to boot was a nightmare. Still I have it all running sweet and dual booting is no problem so I'm a happy chappy.

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984